A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

“I believe I see,” Crook brooded, tugging at one of the two long braids in his beard. Then quickly he looked up, pointing at Frank, “You go tell your battalion that they remain under your command and will take their orders from no one else but the commander of this expedition.”

“Understood, General,” Frank replied.

Crook wagged his head as he looked at a sullen Lieutenant Clark, then turned back to Frank North. “Still, my heart wishes the Sioux and your Pawnee could get along better. To be friends now that we’re all soldiers together.”

Frank rubbed a boot toe on the frozen ground, in the manner of a man looking for the right words to put on a difficult subject. “General—if I may—to force the Sioux and the Pawnee to become friends will be very difficult, for they have been bitterest enemies for many generations.” North went on to briefly relate how long ago the Pawnee felt the pressure of the Lakota bands when the Sioux first moved onto the plains.

Crook said, “I see. So it would be fair to say the Pawnee and the Sioux have had themselves a blood feud for a long, long time.”

“Now, General—if you wish to issue an order commanding the Pawnee to make up with their bitterest enemies,” North said, “I will do all in my power to have it obeyed.”

After a moment more of reflection, Crook replied, “No, I don’t wish to force them to be friendly against their will. Still, if they were friendly, I believe it would be better for all concerned, and this expedition.”

“Well, I’ll talk to my Pawnee about it and hear what they have to say,” Frank said. “We’ll head back to camp now and cut out those seventy head—the extra ponies the lieutenant here can turn over to the Sioux.”

The task was done before twilight. Yet, as predicted, the matter appeared far from over, at least from the word brought to the North’s camp that night by Todd Randall, the same white scout who was married to a Sioux woman at the Red Cloud Agency and had been instrumental in helping the Pawnee trackers locate Red Cloud’s village the night before the guns and ponies were captured.

“Just figured you ought to know to keep an eye locked on your horses, fellas,” Randall said. “Maybe best to keep ’em close to your beds.”

North asked, “Why’s that, friend?”

“The Sioux say they’re gonna get both them ponies you brothers picked outta their herd. Kill ’em somewhere up the trail.”

Sitting Bull’s Scalp in Danger

up North.

DAKOTA

The Fight with Sitting Bull

CHICAGO, November 1.—The official report of the battle between Sitting Bull, Pretty Deer, Bull Eagle, John Sausarie, Standing Bear, and White Bear, on Cedar Creek, the general results of which were given in a Bismarck dispatch last night, states that a number of Indians are known to have been killed and five wounded. The report concludes: “I believe this matter can be closed now by vigorous work, but some cavalry is indispensible.”

“Goddamn you, Soul!’ the big sergeant major bawled at the young private. “Be a little lively around here! We’re pulling out, by God!”

William Earl Smith swallowed, saluted, and stood stiffly until his superior had passed down that row of dog tents coming down like fluffs of goose down upon the dirty snow. It had been snowing off and on for two days now, and colder than anything Smith had experienced back east.

Once Stephen Walsh was on out of hearing range there in the cavalry camp below Fort Fetterman, Smith let out a gush of air he had been holding during the cruel tongue-lashing.

“Great, big, overgrown Irishman,” he muttered under his breath, wondering if he had done the wrong thing by accepting this assignment to become one of Mackenzie’s five orderlies for the Powder River Expedition.

He liked the general—why, Mackenzie had even offered Smith a drink from his own personal flask the colonel kept buried somewhere inside that big caped wool coat of his. But that sergeant major who ran roughshod over all of Mackenzie’s orderlies? Now, that was as close to genuine loathing as William Earl Smith had ever come.

Why, that damned mick made fun of the way Smith ate, the way he sat in the saddle, even how the private spoke. What with the way the orderlies were cursed and treated by the commissioned officers too, especially the tyrannical Captain Clarence Mauck, who more than once had threatened to make William Earl walk the whole campaign … how Earl dreamed of stepping right up to those arrogant stuffed shirts and poking one of them in the nose for good measure.

“Goddamn you, Soul—but it takes you longer to dress than a whole company!” Smith began to mimic the sergeant major’s gruff and peaty brogue. “Smith this … and Smith that,” he grumbled under his breath as he turned to finish packing his haversack. “Wished I was born with another name sometimes.”

A few days back, when Walsh was bawling for him, the sergeant’s abuse had finally got to the private and Smith had made the mistake of answering in kind, “What the hell do you want?”